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One good thing about a season of cheer and jollity:
It puts you in the right mood to look back on the year gone by.
Sometimes you need a little cheering before you can look steadily at what you did with yourself, and for a whole year.
This time around, as it happens, I have not been needing that extra cheering. Years have certainly gone by I have wanted to wad up and throw away with more gusto than this one.
This may have been a good one.
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Regard this lesson in reality we call 2002.
Putting aside the wild dreams every witted soul has at odd, uncontrollable moments, I entered the year with only a few goals, in terms of musical activity.
Few, yet also lofty goals.
How lofty they were did not sink in until just now.
Now I wonder how in the world it could have happened that I not only thought these things could be done, but then also somehow managed to do them.
Not by myself, of course. Mountains of help came from quite a few folk, Martha above all.
These were not hugely impressive things. Almost nobody knew about these plans, in the beginning. Almost nobody knows about these mild accomplishments now, at the end of the year. By the same token, almost nobody cares that these things were done. No one but us chickens.
Yet the fact remains that these things moved from idea to fact.
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Three such goals made that move:
To put a recording into the world, and to get at least a little airplay for it; to get the performing electric band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind going; and to get the acoustic band Keg Salad going.
The CD was made of music Martha and I recorded in 2001, but had not managed to put out that year. It came out in January, 2001. For whatever bizarre reason, it had a little European webplay and airplay before it started getting local airplay. By the end of the year, the CD was on rotation at our local, university-based, alternative rock station.
The electric band to perform the songs was something we still only dreamed about, at the beginning of 2002; and we had to keep dreaming about it for half a year yet. When it came together, however, things happened quickly enough. Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind made its debut as a performing band at the beginning of August. By the end of the year, it had played six shows.
The acoustic band was something that just seemed sensible to do, too, even if it meant putting together two bands at the same time. Initially we used it as we had planned to: the acoustic band opened for the electric band. Then the acoustic band landed itself a repeating gig, and ended the year with nine shows behind it.
Looking back now, all I can see is the hubris of this writer and musician guy who thought he could put together a miniature recording business and two bands in the course of a year, and make it work.
None of it actually did work, of course, in the way you might mean if you talked about a business being born and succeeding. By normal terms nothing about it succeeded. Hundreds of promotional copies of the CD went out, in order to garner a handful of reviews and something hovering around zero in sales. Hundreds of practice hours led to about a dozen shows, which earned back a small fraction of the expense of assembling the bands. The electric band Mad Melancholy Monkey Mind has performed to probably between one and two hundred people, while Keg Salad has played for two or three hundred people ... numbers not apt to stagger anyone.
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The cheering notion for the season is this:
It happened.
The redeeming fact is that anything happened at all.
We live in a world in which corporations actively spend millions of dollars in order to make you think the way they want you to think. They want you to have their ideas, to dream their dreams, to want what they want you to want. They spend money in hopes you will not think on your own, and not act on your own. They spend money in hopes you will not do for yourself, at the expense of imagination and sweat, that which they will do for you gladly, at the expense of cash and indebtedness. They spend money in hopes that you are, or will become, what they want you to be.
They do not spend the money because of who you are as an individual.
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Against the backdrop of a corporate-molded world, the redeeming fact, as I said, is that anything happened at all.
A small group of songs is now out there, available for anyone at all to hear, if they so choose. Two of us are taking a good deal of pleasure on a regular basis in performing as an acoustic group; and we are finding that pleasure not only in the music itself but also in the audience ("Some of the words in your songs . . . man," said a sodden soul one night. "I want to know when you play again." And he scribbled an e-mail address that does not work, or that I cannot read). And another, bigger group of us is taking a good deal of pleasure in performing as a larger rock group.
I personally am taking an incredible amount of pleasure in doing something that puts my song-writing daemon on its proper chain.
These things, all of them, came from scratch; from nothing . . .
Or they came from a long run of years, scratching at nothingness.
Consider the fact that in our corner of the world a small set of events have unfolded that have unfolded nowhere else in exactly the same way.
And that those events have actually been kind of fun.
So cheers to you all.
And to the creative impulse, to that need to make newness where before there was nothing.
Deep thanks to all who have helped and talked and listened along the way.
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Cheers,
Mark Rich
24 December '02
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You may still read the May essay here, the July essay here, and the October essay here.
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